Ethereum 2026: Rebuilding the Future of the Ecosystem
2026-02-24Beginner News
2026-02-24Beginner News
Vitalik: "The original vision of Layer 2s as 'Branded Sharding' to solve Ethereum's scalability is no longer tenable."
On February 3, 2026, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin posted a short yet industry-shaking statement on X. The impact of this statement was no less than when he personally championed the "Rollup-centric" roadmap in 2020. In that widely discussed post, Vitalik admitted: "The original vision of Layer 2s as 'Branded Sharding' to solve Ethereum's scalability is no longer tenable."
This sentence is not only a scrutiny of Ethereum’s mainstream narrative over the past five years but also resembles a long-overdue confession. The Layer 2 (L2) camp, once regarded as Ethereum's "lifeline," is facing its most severe legitimacy crisis since its inception. Vitalik’s criticism strikes at the core: if a second-layer network possesses extremely high throughput but connects to the mainnet only via a multisig bridge controlled by a few individuals, it is essentially a centralized database wearing an L2 mask, failing to truly extend Ethereum's decentralized value.
Why did a former consensus evolve into today's burden? This is not just a change in technical roadmaps, but a gamble between power, capital, and decentralized ideals. To understand the future of Ethereum, we must first see clearly how it reached this point and how, at this juncture in 2026, the Ethereum mainnet is reclaiming its "sovereignty."
Born from Adversity: Layer 2 Was Once the Only Survival Strategy
Looking back at 2021, it was Ethereum's darkest yet most glorious moment. The lingering heat of DeFi Summer and the sweeping wave of NFTs turned Ethereum into the world's busiest settlement layer, but also earned it the notorious reputation of a "noble chain." In May 2021, average Ethereum transaction fees exceeded $50, and a simple Uniswap swap could even cost over a hundred dollars in gas fees.
Under such survival pressure, "Ethereum killers" like Solana rose rapidly with extremely high performance and low fees. Anxiety permeated the community: if Ethereum could not scale quickly, it would lose all its developers and users. Consequently, the "Rollup-centric" roadmap proposed by Vitalik in October 2020 became the hope of the entire ecosystem.
The logic of this concept was exceptionally elegant: since mainnet scaling was too slow, move transactions off-chain for processing, while the mainnet handles only data storage and final settlement. Layer 2s were defined as Ethereum's "Branded Sharding"—acting like avatars of the mainnet, inheriting its security while providing infinite capacity. To support L2s, Ethereum even introduced EIP-4844 in the 2024 Dencun upgrade, creating dedicated "data storage space (Blobs)" and reducing L2 costs by over 90%.
During that period, L1 actively stepped back, content to be a quiet settlement layer, yielding the center stage to L2 powerhouses like Arbitrum, Optimism, Base, and Starknet.
Legitimacy Crisis: Those "Centralized Databases" Valued at Billions
However, as technical ideals collided with commercial reality, problems began to surface. Vitalik’s remarks in early 2026 punctured the bubble behind L2 prosperity. The biggest pain point lay in the fact that the vast majority of L2s did not move toward decentralization as promised.
In Ethereum’s definition, a true L2 should reach "Stage 2"—meaning it possesses a decentralized proof system and allows users to withdraw assets without permission. But the reality was that by 2026, Arbitrum, which held 40% of the market share, and Optimism, which followed closely, were still hovering at Stage 1 or lower. Their sequencers remained highly centralized, with the power to bundle and order transactions held by the project teams.
Commercial interests became a stumbling block to decentralization. A centralized sequencer means project teams can control MEV (Maximum Extractable Value) revenues and more flexibly meet regulatory requirements. For projects backed by hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital (VC) seeking rapid growth, fully handing over power to the community meant losing control over the "treasury."
Worse still, some L2 project teams privately admitted that due to "client regulatory requirements," they would never relinquish final control. This completely infuriated Vitalik. In his view, these might be successful commercial products, but they are absolutely not "extensions of Ethereum." When cross-chain bridges still rely on multisig management, and when security is still built on "trust" in a project team rather than "mathematical proof," L2 becomes an infrastructure "echo chamber."
The Awakening of the Mainnet: The L1 Technical Explosion
If L2 were merely slow in its decentralization progress, there might still be room for redemption. But the true game-changer was that Ethereum L1 became stronger.
As early as February 2025, Vitalik released a key signal: "L1 is scaling." By 2026, this prophecy became reality. Through the Fusaka upgrade at the end of 2025 and the Glamsterdam hard fork in 2026, the technical metrics of the Ethereum mainnet underwent a qualitative change.
First was the introduction of parallel processing capabilities. Previously, Ethereum was like a one-way street where all transactions had to queue. The technical breakthrough of 2026 gave Ethereum parallel execution capabilities similar to Solana. Second was the significant increase in the Gas Limit. By introducing stateless clients and EIP-4444 to reduce the historical data storage burden, running an Ethereum node became extremely lightweight, and the mainnet Gas Limit soared from 30M to 200M.
The result was staggering: in January 2026, the average transaction fee on the Ethereum mainnet dropped to $0.44, and fell below $0.1 during off-peak hours. What does this mean? It means the Ethereum mainnet already possesses the capacity to directly serve large-scale applications.
When the mainnet itself is fast and cheap, while possessing the highest level of security and liquidity, why should users bear the risk of cross-chain bridges to use an L2? Cross-chain bridges caused billions of dollars in losses in 2022, and liquidity fragmentation made moving assets between different L2s a torment for users. Ethereum in 2026 is proving the power of "simplicity is the ultimate sophistication": the most powerful scaling solution is making L1 itself strong enough.
The Bursting Bubble: Ghost Towns and Zero-Sum Competition
With the strong return of L1, the financial bubble in the L2 sector began to burst at an accelerated pace.
Over the past few years, driven by airdrop expectations and VC capital, the number of L2s exploded. However, aside from Base relying on Coinbase's native traffic and Arbitrum relying on its deep DeFi heritage, most L2s that raised massive funds are becoming "ghost towns."
The case of Starknet is highly representative. Despite its deep technical foundations, its token price has shrunk by 98% from its peak. After losing the lure of airdrops, its daily active users and transaction fee revenues were not even enough to cover basic server costs. The market has realized that simple "scaling" is no longer a valuable selling point because scaling has become overabundant.
A more severe issue is the value extraction from L1 by L2s. After the Dencun upgrade, the data fees L2s paid to the mainnet became extremely low. While this reduced user costs, it also led to a sharp decline in Ethereum mainnet revenue, causing the deflationary narrative to face challenges. L2s acted like vines parasitic on the great tree of Ethereum; while lowering their own costs, they failed to bring back enough nutrients to the parent body, instead causing a fragmentation of liquidity.
21Shares stated bluntly in its 2026 outlook report: most Ethereum Layer 2s will not survive the next two years. The market is undergoing a brutal consolidation where only projects that can truly provide "differentiated value" will remain at the table.
Repositioning: L2 is Not Dying, but Returning to a "Plugin" Role
So, where is the future of Layer 2? Vitalik’s answer is: functional value-add.
If L2s merely pursue TPS (Transactions Per Second), they will be unable to compete with the evolved Ethereum L1. Future L2s must transition from being "avatars" to "plugins," providing special functions that L1 cannot or will not provide:
Extreme Privacy Protection: Utilizing Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP) technology to provide compliant private transactions for financial institutions with high privacy requirements. Optimization for Specific Scenarios: Such as ultra-low latency environments designed for fully on-chain games, or dedicated execution layers designed for AI computation. Millisecond Confirmation Speeds: Although L1 has become faster, it is still limited by consensus mechanisms and cannot achieve millisecond response times, leaving space for high-performance trading layers. Exploration of Non-Financial Use Cases: Such as decentralized social media and identity verification—scenarios with extreme throughput demands and different security trade-offs.
Under this new framework, Ethereum will no longer be a "federation composed of L2s," but an ecosystem with a "powerful L1 at its core, supplemented by L2 plugins with various functions." Power is returning to L1, and sovereignty is returning to decentralized consensus.
Conclusion: Ethereum's Resilience and the Cost of Growth
The greatness of Ethereum lies not in the fact that it never makes mistakes, but in its extremely powerful capacity for self-correction.
From the "forced decentralization" to L2 in 2020 to the "active reclamation" of L1 in 2026, this cycle was not time wasted. The Layer 2 camp has spent the last five years exploring the frontiers of zero-knowledge proofs, experimenting with various account abstraction solutions, and paving a smoother road for Web2 users to enter Web3.
But as Vitalik pointed out, we must be wary of centralized traps operating under the banner of decentralization. As the Ethereum L1 Gas Limit pushes toward 200M and mainnet transactions enter the "cent era," Ethereum no longer needs to rely on sacrificing decentralization for L2s to exchange for survival.
This liquidation regarding "Branded Sharding" is a sign of Ethereum reaching maturity. It tells the market: the value anchor of Ethereum will always be that never-stopping, decentralized global computer—not any high-valuation centralized database.
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